kaberett | Entries tagged with make house a home

= Adam.

It is arriving on Saturday.

I have spent some of this evening hanging dirty, soggy, wash powder-encrusted clothing out to dry.

Elsewise I am mostly reading What Happened to You? (Bruce D. Perry & Oprah Winfrey), and having lots of happy bubbly thoughts about it, but I have been gently informed that harrowing developmental trauma is not actually a good bedtime conversation or indeed a relaxing light lunchtime conversation. Possibly I will get around to actually writing this one up; definitely it is the case that a day or so ago I Admitted that I was going to want to take enough notes that it was worth breaking them out onto their own pages, instead of continuing to intersperse them among the daily minutiae composed of such things as "hanging out the laundry"...

We had a plumber ALL day today (this is an exaggeration: they showed up a little after 10 and left a little after 4) and consequently we have: Fancier Radiator Valves (of particular interest to A) and a shiny new kitchen tap. The shiny new tap has an EXTENDABLE HOSE to be an ELEPHANT with but the actual best thing about it is I can turn the hot water off one-handed. Old tap was at "need both hands, watch the sink unit flex", so this is extremely welcome.
Because Plumber, and in particular their obviously wildly unreasonable need to have Access to Radiators, we (I say "we", it was mostly Adam) Performed The Dread Ritual of dismantling the sofa, propping it up on its side, and vacuuming the hell out of it. Located in the process: a fountain pen that had been vaguely puzzling me, because I thought there ought to be one more in my pen case but couldn't think what it was; the metal thimble I knew I had dropped down the gap between units but had been unable to fish out using a Magnet Onna Stick; more Adventuresome Beans.
While coveting seeds last night, I discovered that (i) RealSeeds now lists Trinidad Perfume, a heatless Scotch Bonnet I've been wanting to grow for years but have never managed to get a plant to maturity, and (ii) it was marked as sold out. So I e-mailed them, asking if they were expecting a restock on a timescale such that it made sense for me to hold off on placing the rest of my order, and promptly received the cheerful and helpful answer that YES. (Significantly more expensive than the South Devon Chilli Farm, but they're also currently sold out and I'm particularly fond of RealSeeds.)
This evening we have mostly been putting the house back in order, eating Easy Dinner (chilli and cornbread made yesterday; Malvern pudding with apples stewed in 2021 and sat patiently in the pantry ever since, with cut-price supermarket custard), and Looking At Rocks. I finally got my rock collection down and talked A through it (or, well, at least the bits of the stories that I remember now), and it was lovely to handle all of them. (Also I did exercise and got endorphins and Felt Capable, and that too was lovely.)
Last week I promised myself A Whole Entire Panettone. I have not actually consumed The Whole Entire Panettone yet, but we do have one, and I have been working on it. And now, hopefully, we are going to have at least a few days with slightly fewer non-maintenance Things happening All The Time...

Drugs arrived! Whereupon I took myself out of the house to buy The Individual Trifle Of Operant Conditioning, had an incidental Intense Social Anxiety, and as a result of said Intense Social Anxiety found some mosaics I'd never previously seen despite the fact they've apparently been in situ since 2010...

two mosaics on a brick wall, depicting a station and a smock mill

Robinsons -- Windmill

1720 -- 1904

This smock mill stood in Old Park Road at the top of Windmill Hill, two hundred and four feet above sea level. It ceased to be used by 1896 and was demolished in 1904. Several generations of the Robinson family ran the mill.

St Mary Magdalene Church was built in 1881-3 to the designs of the famous ecclesiastical architect William Butterfield.

... discovered the existence of The Family Bike Club and also ducked into the charity shop halfway up the hill. Where.

large heavy metal snail, with its eyes out mid-explore, in use as a doorstop

There was. A Snail.

I very nearly just took a photo of them to send to Adam and left them there, but thankfully I realised it would be vastly preferable to Just Buy Them and then get to see what Adam's face did when I walked in holding them. And the look was indeed worth £12.50 to support Mind! But they are also an excellent doorstop that is equal to the task of the internal door that's on a sprung chain Situation to keep it closed, which we almost always want open, so in fact what has happened is that I have acquired a new pet...

Today started, auspiciously, with me getting Adam to hold my hand through a bunch of detailed troubleshooting of the four-way block that's command-stripped to the wall just above my bedside table for the purposes of plugging in my bedside lamp, my phone/watch charger, hair clippers, etc. I'd checked that everything plugged into it still worked in different sockets, and then moved the actual four-way block through to the living room to test it with a different electron source (all four sockets!) and was perplexed to find that Everything Was Fine. I'd been gearing up to get the multimeter out and check the fuse in the plug and so on and so forth, but it was all... mysteriously fine?

So I took it back to the bedroom, plugged it back in, and experienced The Dawning Realisation that the great big clonk my phone made falling down the back of it last night?

Had bounced off the switch rendering the whole damn assembly turned off at the wall.

Anyway, this evening I have a migraine, but in the meantime (with more of A's supervision) I used some power tools and reseasoned some cast iron and oiled and sharpened a variety of gardening blades, and I'm less miserable than I might be, so on balance it has been a satisfactory day.

As a household we have, I think, now moved over from using Regularly to using Tody.

We'd been saying for ages that what we Really Wanted was Regularly, but with Syncing Across Devices. Tody... more-or-less achieves this. (It's less than a fiver a year for the subscription that gets you the multiple accounts/devices situation.) There are a bunch of aspects of the user interface and display I resent for being Different, but -- for multi-person household-task wrangling it is more-or-less working.

(hat tip to

shanaqui for bringing it to my attention!)

As I have previously mentioned, and as the joke goes, There Are Two Kinds Of Autistics...

... and in this specific instance, I'm "leave things out on the side until it's empty enough that I can work up the executive function to put them away neatly" to A's "shove everything into the cupboard until it becomes completely untenable and then haul it all out to reorganise", where the more chaotic the cupboard is the less able I am to put things away and the more things are out on the side the more desperately he'll shove them into cupboards anywhere they fit.

Negotiating this incompatibility is... a work in progress. :-p

But! We recently had another go-round with "how is it possible to distinguish between things I've left out because I have a specific near-future purpose in mind for them, versus those I've left out because Nope?" and I abruptly realised that a trivial and straightforward solution that I can implement with precisely 0 problem is "have a dedicated pad of kitchen post-its, plus a dedicated kitchen pen, preferably attached to the fridge".

Because! You see! It is absolutely ingrained that one of the last things you do on your way out of lab is you look around and you see what you've left out in communal areas (as opposed to your dedicated storage space) and you label the shit out of it...

... usually using a post-it.

Thus we have a system that costs me approximately nothing and makes Adam's life much more pleasant, and I am gently amused at transferable skills producing easy wins.

(For starters, I don't have a migraine! I am just dealing with more familiar pain, which is much more tolerable in no small part because it comes with less of the distressing cognitive impairment.)

We wandered out to the allotment a little while after dinner, when the temperature had dropped all the way down to 27 °C. We watered plants. I had a bit of a rummage; I didn't find any fake snakes but I did see what I am pretty sure was a field vole, based mostly on the relatively short tail -- I didn't get a good look at how pointy its snoot was.

And we picked berries, and we came home, and we sat on the decking for a little Detecting A Bat, and admiring the Moon, and trying to work out who the probably-a-planet was, and I saw what I am pretty sure was a (remarkably orange) meteor and then reminded myself that yes, in fact, it's Perseids o'clock.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, the vintage-fountain-pen-in-need-of-restoration I'd accidentally ended up bidding more than I intended on -- I was mid-migraine, I was curious about how much I'd been outbid by, I kept nudging up my max bid until I was the high bidder and then went "... fuck", but it was only a tenner so it'd have been fine -- got sniped back off me in precisely the way I'd been hoping for. It has been very satisfactory all round, and I am very contented.

When I finally peeled myself off the sofa last night, and made it through to the bathroom to brush my teeth and ~~be a flamingo~~ do my balance work and so on, I expected this to be routine and normal and uneventful.

I did not expect the bathroom ceiling to yell at me.

I especially did not expect it to yell at me in French.

( Read more... )

I rolled eventually out of bed this morning, for croissants and strawberries and orange juice and The Forbidden Hot Chocolate, and was summoned by Adam to Observe a Snail. That had climbed almost all the way up the patio doors and was lurking at the top of the glass.

It has been added to the snail tank.

In other "small friends" news, today I was in the process of washing my hair while the pet robot went when I thought I heard upon the door A Knocking. I emerged dubiously from the shower (A was out), observed that the Roomba was crawling up and down the ramp to the front door and banging into it, called "hello?", received no response, and returned to the shower.

Whereupon A sent me a small and pathetic IM explaining very politely that it had been A Knocking, that was not performed by our autonomous vacuum cleaner, and could I please let him in because he'd locked himself out (again).

... I remain very amused at having confused the two of them.

So! We have, via one of A's relatives, a baffling M&S jigsaw puzzle: it's a 500-piece map of London partially in German frommm around the latter half of the 19th century.

A's inclination was to stick it in the charity shop pile; I went "no, hold on, I want to do it at least once" and hoicked it back out.

A, having started from a position of "I'm not interested in jigsaw puzzles and I won't be joining in"... not only got sucked in on the first attempt at completion, but also, this week, sadly decreed that He Wanted To Do A Jigsaw, No, A Real Physical One, but that he'd been unable to find any others online that he liked the look of and he didn't know what he was doing wrooooong.

Ooh, says I, I have a shortlist of puzzles I'd Like To Get Around To Reacquiring One Day, they're mostly from about the 80s but they are available second-hand, do you want a list...?

Anyway. The point is that I airily suggested a 1000-piece black-and-white Escher puzzle (Reptiles, in fact, available new from the M. C. Escher company), and A cheerfully decided that this seemed like a good idea and Acquired it.

It arrived a little earlier in the week; we finished our second run-through of the map of London earlier today and got started on the Escher this evening.

... whereupon Adam was extremely dismayed to discover that it's not all slots-and-tabs, right, some of it's "weird crinkly edges", in that he was going through the box pulling out "edges" and I had to go "... ah. no. no that piece of mottled grey you've just pulled out? that's not. an edge. look."

much comic outrage followed and I have been extremely giggly all evening, especially during the Involved Adventure of trying to work out what to transfer the puzzle onto given that... our coffee table is, as we discovered when we'd done most of the edges, too small. (I wound up cannibalising one of the large cardboard boxes that our 25kg flour sacks get delivered in, which had been waiting to get taken out to the recycling at a point when it was neither sub-zero nor Precipitating. And then re-cannibalising it, when A declared -- not unreasonably -- that my first attempt was a terrible idea, being still slightly smaller than the puzzle itself and also thick enough that using it as an extension of the table was going to be... wretched at the join.)

Anyway. Yes. Ottolenghi-at-home dinner, courtesy of A's company's meal-for-two thanks-for-doing-out-of-hours-work vouchers, plus a ridiculous puzzle, and I am extremely cheerful.

... okay. so.

We have: a broken dishwasher.

I have: cut my finger. Not badly, but enough that I don't want to be submerging my hands in hot soapy water and then agitating them. (Washing-up gloves aren't a viable option, for [reasons].)

I had been doing the washing while A did the drying.

... A, it transpires, is the kind of person who doesn't rinse the washing-up suds off before putting things to drip-dry.

~~and this, children, is why you should always follow proper knife safety practices~~

Dishwasher broke on Monday, though this was confirmed late enough Monday night that we didn't bother catching up with the washing-up then.

We have done two and a bit stints since, and to my very great resentment this is actually resulting in the kitchen being overall cleaner than I've been managing from the depths of the Thesis Swamp.

( [plague diaries] )

On the upside: we bought a new one as Our Very First Action upon Becoming Homeowners on the 9th of October 2018.

It failed on the 28th of September 2020.

It has a two-year warranty.

Staying up until 3am finishing T. Kingfisher's The Wonder Engine was not the best idea I've ever had, but -- I have an e-reader that facilitates late-night reading-under-the-covers (being both book and torch!), and I did go back to sleep after breakfast, and I enjoyed the book a very great deal, so on the whole I think that's a win.
Text message from my GP surgery: the paperwork A dropped off with them for me has been completed and is available for collection, at no charge, so that's in my future. (Or more probably in A's future.)
I have completed all the fiddly bits of a tedious tech-repair job, that was made substantially more difficult by failing to register a step in the instructions for part replacement #1, necessitating part replacement #2, but all I gotta do now is get the screen to stick down properly (currently it's face-down with a pile of books on top of it) and I'll be done and can reclaim the coffee table for ART. (If the pile-of-books doesn't work I'll grumble and use the extra dedicated adhesive I have.)
We cleaned the fridge (everything out, including the shelves, and washed; almost everything back in, rather better organised).
For bonus points, we had a communication mismatch at the beginning, and I retreated to a different room to hyperventilate and read a book for 15 minutes, and when I returned... A had calmly and relatively cheerfully carried on Getting Stuff Done without panicking in turn and I was able to slot in and be helpful, and I only cried a very little bit during the debrief.
( Food. )
Having Dealt With the tech repair, and also (in company) The Fridge, and consumed food, I took a deep breath and begged A's indulgence because, uh, we're at a stage in the *gestures* everything where I had no idea where my house keys were, and I'd checked all the obvious places inside the house with no luck, so I got A to take me out to the car to soothe me about whether I'd left them there, which I was increasingly anxious about. No joy from looking in all the obvious sensible places -- but then A opened one of the back doors and did a three-second tidy and they Materialised! So that's one more thing off the agitation stack.
Work is going Interestingly. Still no idea what to make of the Bizarre Graph, but it's percolating.
I've got my act most-of-the-way-to-together to buy myself a new pillow. I've had the current memory-foam-hybrid for getting on for five years, if I recollect rightly; it started out great but it's showing its age and actually if I'm waking up sore and struggling (more than usual) to get to sleep, it is very definitely worth getting a replacement. I've a shortlist; actually making a decision probably happens tomorrow night, now, because I want to talk it over with A (in case he wants in on the order, all else aside) and, well, The Fridge.
This preposterous mug, linked to me by a friend. It is emblazoned with the first line of Catullus 16 (NSFW text). Claims the description: "Translates to 'I love you'". I have been enjoying it all evening.

I put an entirely-green tomato (it came off in me hand) in the fruit bowl with the bananas and it's actually ripening: it's been there about a week, this morning I was at "hmm, is that turning yellow?", and it is now unambiguously turning red. I am very excited about this!
I spent a bunch of this morning sorting out my accounts; I'd not been doing great at keeping up with them since about... April... but a quarterly statement arrived last week and, well, I'm now up to date, so that's one background stressor down.
I have come to the possibly dubious conclusion that in addition to tracking (in my giant nearly decade-old spreadsheet) what I've read when, and author demographics, and brief notes, and so on, I should also track when I bought things (or who I borrowed them from, etc), and thus elapsed time between acquisition and consumption. This in turn means I'm... actually going to set myself up with a list of Things I Haven't Read Yet But Own And Want To, in addition to the "recs received" list, because that's the easiest way to track acquisition date with my current set-up, and long story short I think I might be procrastinating.
I have picked up a reread, however, which is. A doorstop of a hardback. That I want to keep Nice. And it turns out there are in fact many reasons that I mostly don't read hardcopy full stop let alone hardbacks, still, and also that the ebook is currently £4.99, so I think I'll keep going for the first chapter or two and probably then grudgingly admit ~~defeat~~ that discretion is the better part of valour and that I really like this book.
Two days ago, Freecycle went "hey, do you want an exercise bike?" "Hmm," thinks I, "well Adam will probably say we don't have space for it and even if he doesn't it'll probably be gone by the time either of us reply," but I sent him the link and heard nothing back and made mild enquiries later that evening about his thoughts on the topic and, uh, yesterday evening (1) we picked up an exercise bike and (2) A spent a bunch of time Doing Some Tidying to make space for it. It is... very much designed for a 6' tall man, and it is a bare-bones model with minimal scope for adjustment, but I did a slightly incautious three minutes and my knee isn't screaming, so, let's see how it's feeling tomorrow, eh?

Specifically: the laundering of socks.

Adam's preferred approach is to fill up the washing machine without regard to the detail of exactly what's included, cull lonely socks into a dedicated bag in his sock drawer, and then reunite said lonely socks every time either (1) he runs out of pairs or (2) (more usually) the bag ends up full.

My preferred approach is to make sure that every sock that goes into a wash is accompanied by its pair.

Again, these are not... entirely... compatible. Largely we resolve this through Adam graciously attempting to keep track of my socks when he's putting a load such that he only launders pairs, and by me leaving my lonely socks on the socktopus until their pair appears, which works well right up until it doesn't.

See, if we've both got overwhelmed for long enough that the laundry basket could... charitably be described as "full", A. quite reasonably decides that the perfect is the enemy of the good and any laundry at all getting done is much much better than none, so he shovels a load into the machine without paying attention to the socks and honestly this is entirely reasonable and I am grateful for it...

... except that he displays remarkable skill at washing precisely half my socks, i.e. one and only one from each possible pair, whenever this situation arises.

Which would still be fine!

Except what this means is that the laundry mountain is now back down to slightly more manageable levels, so we resume attempting to keep on top of it before we get that overwhelmed again, at which point A. reverts to not putting any of my socks in the wash unless he can find their pair also in the basket.

Their pair.

Which is clean.

And sitting on the socktopus awaiting a joyful reunion.

And that's how I've come perilously close to running out of socks multiple times in the past month.

adam FIXED the GARAGE. (... garidge.) We'd both spent some time failing to work out why you needed to nudge one side closed with your knee or your toe (or whatever) to lock it, instead just ingraining the physical habits and muscle memory, and then last week A spent Some More Time messing about with the wiring and spotted what was wrong and fixed it. So now I'm having to unlearn the automatic but redundant knee-wiggle. (I am interacting with the garage most days, when I go to the plot: it's where the Tramper is stored, so this is a big quality-of-life improvement but also! a b i g adjustment.)

Okay so. You have a cupboard. The cupboard... needs organising.

If you are me: you spend up to a couple of weeks taking things out of the cupboard and then leaving them on the counter until the cupboard's about half-empty, at which point you gather the cope to Sort It Out. (The more full the cupboard is the more overwhelmed you are and the less you have cope for anything including getting things out of it when you need them.)

If you are A: you keep putting things back into the cupboard willy-nilly until you hit a convenient confluence of executive function and boredom, then take everything out and put it back in a way that makes sense. (The more cluttered the side is the more overwhelmed you are and the less you have cope for anything, especially putting things away neatly.)

These two approaches... are not super compatible, especially if you both keep getting low-grade (minorly! briefly! fleetingly, even!) exasperated with the other person for Not Doing The Obviously Sensible Thing.

IT IS OKAY WE SORTED IT OUT but the conversation was a solid ten minutes of staring at each other in mounting confusion and perplexity and bafflement while we tried to make the words go enough to fit the concept of the One True Way into each others' heads before we finally got it resolved. (I'd say "sorted out" but that... is a job for another day.)

Thing that is nice: I am mostly, currently, getting to horn practice o'clock after dinner, starting around eight, which is to say, just about as bat o'clock rolls around. I get to sit in the study and make ~~squawking~~ music and watch A Bat happen. It is lovely.

Another thing that is nice: I have spent the afternoon pivoting from "ugh but I don't WANT to read this paper from 1997" (the year I finally learned how to tie a shoelaces, via a lot of concerted effort) to "as a geologist I get to gleefully declare that I am CORRECT about the fundamental nature of the world and it's even ACCURATE (and now I've done that maths I suppose I'd better read the paper)".

I'm still see-sawing wildly between solid trust in my own models and towering impostor syndrome, of course, but it's so satisfying that every time I go "oh heck I didn't consider this constraint--" my beautiful model just. satisfies it. without even needing any massaging. Almost as if I'm right, or something.

We've decided, fairly unambiguously, that we're keeping the pet robot.

This leads inexorably to the issue of names. In keeping with a tradition of naming robots after qualities we ourselves wish to have or otherwise emulate, obviously something like "Spirit" or "Curiosity" is the way to go, right?

I was pondering whether "Rover" would be too on-the-nose, and then

sebastienne suggested Endeavour, and, well, late entries to this unofficial competition are very welcome but I think there might already be a winner.

Some time ago, we I spotted some appropriate black-out blinds in a charity shop: we were reluctant to buy new because the bedroom windows are really quite wide, and fitting blinds are therefore really quite expensive, but there were three in the local Mind, of which we needed two, and one of them was stripy!

... of course, by the time I'd dragged A in to look at them, the stripy one had evaporated and we were left with only the uninspiring beige, but such is life.

For some time now, then, the study has had a black-out blind to go with the Venetian blinds, meaning that the room is really quite a lot darker in the mornings in summer, which is all to the good.

However.

We got all the way through putting up the brackets in the main bedroom... and then realised that, somewhere along the way, we'd squished the tube a bit, and it was No Longer Straight. The most unavoidably awkward facet of this Situation was that the other blind, the blind we'd put up in the spare room, despite being of identical original form-factor... had been cut to a slightly shorter length, so it wasn't even like we could just swap it over.

John Lewis had discontinued the design and were not equipped to simply provide us with a replacement in exchange for cold hard cash.

I spent some time attempting to unbend the thing, via application of heat guns and mop handles and, eventually, broom handles. The broom handle -- my third attempt -- did it. The mop handle, unfortunately, despite having been fine every time I checked it along the way, became stuck.

Many kinds of lubricant were applied. None had any notable effect.

The tube has been sat, for some time, in the pantry, with a mop head sticking forlornly out the top, being roundly ignored.

Today the weather was nice enough and I was sufficiently procrastinatory that I pulled it out of the pantry, along with my grandfather's tiny sledgehammer and a length of thin aluminium tubing that might once have been part of the mechanism for a greenhouse roller blind (this guess being not entirely a stab in the dark; it came with the greenhouse), and is conveniently Even Thinner.

The mop, you will be pleased to hear, now protrudes substantially more from the end of the roller into which it was first inserted: so far so good, except inasmuch as the entire assemblage is now too tall to be stood back on its end in a disgraced corner of the pantry, and probably even too long to similarly be shoved to the back of a cupboard.

The greenhouse tubing... well. In an outcome I probably could have foreseen, it was easily and readily removed the first several times I tried. I got lax with checking, therefore, until the point at which I decided I probably wished to remove it again, with about a hand's width protruding still from the tube we first thought of, and discovered... that in fact I could not shift it. Any more. Oh, I could wiggle it from side to side -- it's much narrower diameter than the Original Tube -- but could I get it to move? Could I hell.

On the other hand, it's much narrower diameter and there wasn't exactly an obvious downside to just... accepting that it lived inside the O.T. now... so I gave it a few more taps with the sledgehammer, in the hopes that this would at least get enough more of the (greasy, remember, because I lubricated it at any earlier stage of proceedings) mop handle out t'other end, such that I could finally actually remove it.

Adam is, for some reason, underwhelmed by my assertion that, just as "technically correct" is the best kind of correct to be, "technically progressed" is the best kind of progress.

I am typing this sat on the sofa glancing, occasionally, at the Dismal Tube, but discretion is the better part of valour, and all that, so: here's a present, Future Alex, and you're welcome.

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

today we* have bought a new washing machine

some good things

made a friend!

[diarish]

[housekeeping] quick rec: Tody

transferable... something, anyway

this evening has been lovely

misadventures in cohabitation

... we have a second snail

in which I giggle a lot

[minor domestic incompatibilities] noooooooooooooooo

dishwashn't

some good things make a post

bulletin

more minor household incompatibility

a quick report

amusing minor household incompatibilities

diarish

on the naming of robots

technically progress

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June 2025

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